Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Cases
- List of Statutes
- Introduction
- 1 The Act of Definition
- 2 The Indian State in Response to Housing Claims
- 3 Mapping the Legal Environment
- Conclusions
- Annexure 1 Central Housing Law and Policy
- Annexure 2 National Campaign for Housing Rights
- Annexure 3 The National Right to Homestead Bill, 2013
- References
- Index
3 - Mapping the Legal Environment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2019
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Cases
- List of Statutes
- Introduction
- 1 The Act of Definition
- 2 The Indian State in Response to Housing Claims
- 3 Mapping the Legal Environment
- Conclusions
- Annexure 1 Central Housing Law and Policy
- Annexure 2 National Campaign for Housing Rights
- Annexure 3 The National Right to Homestead Bill, 2013
- References
- Index
Summary
In Give a Man a Fish, James Ferguson tells the tale of a housing rights workshop in Cape Town, organised by a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) in order to inform a group of shack-dwellers—who had been seeking better living conditions to no avail—of their legal entitlements:
Presentations were made and PowerPoints displayed describing in detail the constitutional right to housing. NGO workers stood up one after another, patiently explaining to the assembled crowd what rights are and who has them, what legal guarantees apply to housing, the history of housing rights in South Africa, and so on. At the end of several hours of this, a tired looking old man in the back of the room stood up, raised his hand, and said quietly: ‘I'm afraid there has been some mistake here. All I have heard about today is that I have the right to a house. Now that is all very well. But the problem is I don't want the right to a house.’ A heavy silence settled on the room, as the workshop leaders looked at one another in confusion. At last, the man continued: ‘I want a house.’
There is nothing surprising about this disillusionment with the language of the law, especially in contexts where the presence of a legal right does not translate to the enjoyment of the substance of the right. Most human rights lawyers likely have at least one such anecdote at hand at any given point of time. What this story made me think about, however, was the fact that conversations about legal rights are not efforts at constructing inviolable obligations which prevent the breach of duty. Instead, they are conversations about the construction of remedies to be invoked in the face of widespread violations. This is to say that the existing socio-political context obstructs access to the substance of the right. When the right has already been legally articulated, the inability to check its violations is predominantly chalked down to political unwillingness and tardy implementation. It is not usually acknowledged that a legal right is constructed within an existing legal landscape that has, more often than not, posed as a hindrance to the realisation of the right.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Legal Right to Housing in India , pp. 72 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019